Special Interests

General

Choosing Cheap Destinations

When you’re tied to a budget, choosing cheap destinations is an integral part of your financial planning. But don’t worry, cheap destinations are often more adventurous and fun than the expensive ones.

Choosing destinations is one of the most fun parts of preparing your trip. Apart from financial reasons, there may be another range of reasons for choosing a destination. Making an itinerary is very personal, so instead of choosing the destinations for you, we can only give you some guidelines in finding cheap destinations.

Western, rich countries

First of all, consider this golden rule: the more western (or rich) a destination is, the more expensive it will be. So, if you choose to travel in Europe, North America, or Australia, your trip will be more expensive then it would be elsewhere. Based on this rule, we can list the continents and subcontinents in ascending order of expensiveness:

India

South-east Asia

Latin America

Russia

Eastern Europe

Africa

Australia

Western Europe

North America

Popularity

Another thing to consider, is how popular a destination is with tourists. For instance, Thailand will be more expensive then Laos or Cambodia. And Romania will be less expensive then the Czech Republic.

The above rule has its exceptions. When a destination is attractive, yet too difficult to reach for “normal” tourists, there may only be high end lodging available. Some regions of Africa are an example of this rule.

Depends...

Apart from the rules and guidelines we can give, we also have to say it depends... What are you going to do at your destination? For example, a place like New Guinea is very cheap, when you stay in a village for a long time. But for traveling around, it is very expensive because of a lack of infrastructure.

Now, from what we have seen, what would be the cheap options in every continent we visited?

Europe: Baltic states

Asia: Indonesia (apart from touristy Bali)

Africa: Southern Tanzania

Latin America: Guatemala

Australia: Maryborough

But, this is just a small list we can think of. As we said earlier, find your own itinerary, based on your preferences and the guidelines above.